“This war is not a civil war, it’s a counterrevolutionary war against civilians. It’s a war of military elites against the entire civilian population,” says Sudanese organizer Nisrin Elamin. Sudan is currently experiencing the largest mass displacement event in the world today. Thousands are dead and famine is “almost everywhere” in the country. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Elamin, organizer Yusra Khogali and host Kelly Hayes discuss the historical and political roots of the violence, how global powers are fueling the conflict and the revolutionary efforts of grassroots mutual aid networks on the ground. This episode unpacks what the world is missing about Sudan’s struggle and explains how you can act in solidarity with those fighting for their lives and their freedom.
Music by Son Monarcas & Isobel O’Connor
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the crisis in Sudan, where thousands have been killed and 12 million people have been displaced by ongoing violence. According to the director-general of the World Health Organization, the people of Sudan are experiencing the largest displacement event in the world today, and starvation is “almost everywhere” in the country. Many people I’ve spoken with say they don’t understand what’s driving these conditions, who’s responsible, or what those of us living outside of Sudan can do about it. To help us unpack these dynamics, we will be joined today by Sudanese organizers Nisrin Elamin and Yusra Khogali. Nisrin and Yusra will break down some of the historical and political dynamics behind the violence committed by the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which is a paramilitary force formerly operated by the government of Sudan. They will also highlight on-the-ground organizing efforts in Sudan, and explain how you can support the solidarity work that’s being coordinated in places like Canada and the United States. The pursuit of collective liberation should transcend borders, but that kind of transcendence requires knowledge and understanding. Right now, there are people in Sudan struggling for collective survival and liberation, and that’s work that we should all know about – and that we should all endeavor to support. By the end of this episode, I hope you’ll feel equipped to engage with that work and to spread the word about it.
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[musical interlude]
KH: Nisrin and Yusra, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Nisrin Elamin: Thank you so much for having us and for covering what’s happening in Sudan. We really appreciate it.
KH: I’m so grateful for the opportunity to talk with you both about what’s happening and to learn more about the important work you’re doing. I also want to ask, how are you both doing?
Yusra Khogali: I think that’s such a complicated question in this time. It feels like a very heavy and really challenging time to be Sudanese, to be Black in this moment. And I’m just hoping to use whatever tools that I have as an organizer to support and help any efforts that are relieving what is happening in Sudan, so it’s really tough. Day by day, it’s fighting a lot of despair and anguish, but I think I’m just leaning on the courageous resistance that is coming on the ground in Sudan to inspire and motivate me to continue and extend their work here in the diaspora.
NE: I think Yusra captured beautifully how I feel as well. I think I go between despair. A lot of my family is still in Sudan, and are just facing an uphill battle in terms of the escalating war on the ground, but also feeling very inspired by the mutual aid networks and the organizing, and relief efforts that we’re supporting on the ground that are led by Sudanese people, mostly volunteers. I try to discipline myself to really allow that to lead how I’m thinking about back home and to guide the organizing work that we’re trying to do in the Sudan Solidarity Collective.
KH: Well, I want to say how much I appreciate you making time for this conversation amid everything that’s happening.
Can you tell the audience a bit about yourselves and your work?
NE: My name is Nisrin Elamin. I’m originally from Sudan, and I teach at the University of Toronto in African Studies and Anthropology. And before becoming a reluctant academic, I spent many years as an educator and organizer in the US and in Tanzania, and my research reflects some of that. I research foreign, mostly Gulf Arab, but also domestic land grabs in Central Sudan where part of my family’s from, and also the many forms of resistance and local organizing that they’ve inspired among farmers and agricultural workers and so forth. The Saudis and Emiratis have invested billions in Sudanese land and infrastructure over the last 20 years or so, and they now control more Sudanese land than all of Sudan’s large domestic investors combined. And so some of this is relevant because the UN just declared a full-blown famine in parts of Sudan that are hardest hit by this war.
Half the population are said to be severely food insecure. And one of the few times that The New York Times covered Sudan as a feature story, we saw pictures of starving Sudanese children and their parents on the front page, and we’ve seen these images circulate, but they do so without any context or history. And in my own work, I ask how a country like Sudan that the Nile flows through that has immense agricultural potential that was once called the breadbasket of the Middle East and could easily feed itself, a country that under the British colonial rule, pulled the British cotton industry out of crisis, how so many people could then be at the brink of starvation. And I think the answer is that this man-made famine has been decades in the making and that neoliberal privatization policies recommended by the World Bank decimated the agricultural sector long before this war began.
And so I just wanted to mention that because I think now people are more dependent on food imports from the Gulf, from Asia and Europe. So when this war hit, it displaced millions of farmers off their land. The RSF, which is one of the warring factions, is destroying what’s left of Sudan’s agricultural infrastructure, looting storage facilities and stores and homes, and preventing people from planting, and both the Army and the RSF are obstructing aid and preventing it from getting to people. But that layers itself on top of a much longer process of extraction and dispossession that has benefited Sudanese elites and their international partners for a very long time.
And I just want to mention just a couple days ago I heard the BBC mention that six to 10 million Sudanese could die of disease and hunger by 2027 if things don’t change on the ground. A similar report was issued by a Dutch Institute last year saying 2.5 million Sudanese could die by September. And it’s true that there are people dying of starvation. A child is dying every two hours in the Zamzam Displacement Camp, which is in Darfur. But we haven’t seen the massive numbers of people dying because of this massive network of mutual aid networks that exists across the country led by many of the people who put their lives on the line during the revolution, which we’ll talk about later. So I just wanted to situate my research within that context.
YK: My name is Yusra Khogali. I am a grassroots and community organizer based in Toronto. In 2013, I had co-created the Black Lives Matter Toronto chapter to shift the current landscape of Canada by actively working to dismantle all forms of anti-Black racism. And in 2018, I had left the organization with a public critique of the group’s shifting values and leadership. I’ve also co-created the Black Liberation Collective here in Canada in 2015, which is also a Black student movement through its founding chapter at the University of Toronto that works to create the infrastructure for Black students to build power and eliminate anti-Black racism on and off campus. I’m currently an organizer with the Sudan Solidarity Collective, which aims to resource grassroots civil society formations at the front lines of relief efforts in the parts of Sudan that are being hardest hit by militarized conflict in the wake of this war. And when I’m not doing all that, I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto in the Women and Gender Studies Department.
KH: I really appreciate all of the knowledge and experience that you’re both bringing to this conversation. Before we delve into the current crisis in Sudan, can you offer a bit of historical background in terms of what our listeners might need to know in order to understand what’s presently happening?
NE: So I won’t be able to do justice to all the historical roots of the current war in Sudan, but I think it’s important to situate it within a longer history of state violence, right? This war has colonial roots. It’s shaped by our history of slavery, which expanded when Sudan was under Ottoman rule in the 19th century. And then in 1956 when Sudan became independent, the British basically handed us an economy dependent on the extraction of cash crops like cotton and a political system which was reconfigured to serve the interests of a Nubian- and Arab-identified elite in Sudan’s north and center. And both of these systems developed at the expense of the masses in the south and other marginalized regions, but also of a rural farming population at the center who helped sustain this extractive export oriented economy. So as an example of this, the British vacated 800 administrative seats at independence. And by administrative, I mean civil servants, top army and police officials, agricultural scheme managers, etc., across the country of which Sudan’s new ruling elite allocated six to South Sudan, an area the size of Texas with the population of over 2.5 million. And that process facilitated and enshrined the systemic marginalization of other regions of the country as well, such as Darfur, Eastern Sudan, Kordofan, etc.
A year before independence, Sudan’s first civil war broke out partly because of this between South Sudanese demanding political representation, equitable resource distribution, and regional autonomy in reaction to the Sudanization process and the central government who had essentially subsumed the south as a quasi internal colony. And we can basically draw a straight line from the outbreak of this war in 1955, which over the decades and in its two phases killed over 2.5 million mostly South Sudanese civilians and displaced 4 million people from their land to the current war that arrived in the capital Khartoum on April 15th of last year, in the same way I would say that we can draw a straight line between the Nakba of 1948 to the genocidal violence the Israeli state is currently unleashing in Gaza. We also saw this play itself out in Darfur. Many of your listeners probably remember what happened in 2003, where a state-sanctioned campaign of genocidal violence led by the Janjaweed, which later became the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary force that became part of the security apparatus of the state, was carried out now 20 years ago, right?
Killing hundreds of thousands, wiping out entire villages of non-Arab farming communities and displacing millions of civilians from resource-rich land, which continues to be exploited to fuel this current war. This land has gold and uranium, etc. And this history is important because without it, we tend to exceptionalize the violence of this current war. When the Sudanese states, its army and paramilitary forces have always been extremely violent and extractive, and its violence has always targeted non-Arab communities more than Arab and Nubian communities. And what’s unique about this particular war is not the intensity of the violence, but its scale, right? Its geographic scale or reach. It’s impacted and displaced and killed people from parts of the country that hadn’t experienced this level of violence before, including people in my own family from the north and center who had largely been spared the intensity of the violence that people in Darfur experienced starting in 2003.
And I also think it’s important to frame and understand this war. This is the second maybe historical dimension here as a counter-revolutionary war, right? And to start the shorter history of this war during the December revolution of 2018 and 2019. And so to briefly recap that, in April of 2019, a powerful popular revolution ousted dictator Omar al-Bashir after 30 years in power after converging in a massive, almost million person sit-in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum. So people had gathered from all across the country to essentially demand, they had revolutionary demands that exceeded regime change. And the first demand was to oust the regime, which it managed to do. And then the sit-in remained in place for three months after al-Bashir was removed by the military because people’s demands exceeded calls for regime change. And because military elites from within al-Bashir’s inner circle, the same people that are now fighting for political and economic control of the country, had reclaimed power, right? Calling themselves the Transitional Military Council.
And it’s during this period that the counter-revolution began. The sit-in was brutally broken up through a massacre perpetrated by the same military elites. They killed over 120 people, including someone I personally know. The transitional government was formed in the aftermath of this massacre, and it was a power-sharing agreement between the military council and hand-picked civilian elites, many from the diaspora, who turned outward during this transition, who attempted to open Sudan up after decades of isolation due to Clinton-era sanctions that started in 1997 to international........